Abstract

The descriptions of Secretum manuscripts in England, France, the German area – including Bohemia – and Spain are examined in this article to get clues about the audience of the work. It is shown that it is not possible to distinguish (as it has been occasionally done) between a monastic and a humanistic audience of Petrarch’s Latin oeuvre. The Secretum was often read in the cloister and the author asks for the cause of this interest. She argues that Petrarch evokes in this work conventions of monastic literature to subvert them and present a new model of spiritual life.

Abstract

The descriptions of Secretum manuscripts in England, France, the German area – including Bohemia – and Spain are examined in this article to get clues about the audience of the work. It is shown that it is not possible to distinguish (as it has been occasionally done) between a monastic and a humanistic audience of Petrarch’s Latin oeuvre. The Secretum was often read in the cloister and the author asks for the cause of this interest. She argues that Petrarch evokes in this work conventions of monastic literature to subvert them and present a new model of spiritual life.

Article Networks

TrendTerms displays relevant terms of the abstract of this publication and related documents on a map. The terms and their relations were extracted from ZORA using word statistics. Their timelines are taken from ZORA as well. The bubble size of a term is proportional to the number of documents where the term occurs. Red, orange, yellow and green colors are used for terms that occur in the current document; red indicates high interlinkedness of a term with other terms, orange, yellow and green decreasing interlinkedness. Blue is used for terms that have a relation with the terms in this document, but occur in other documents.
You can navigate and zoom the map. Mouse-hovering a term displays its timeline, clicking it yields the associated documents.